Much has been written lately about traditional enterprise applications essentially being data entry “forms” and reporting structures, which are implemented to support desirable business processes and practices. It is surely a very complex set of structures, and it takes a very large number of professionals to design, maintain and upgrade these structures to ensure proper functionality, security, availability and performance for a very large number of customers. The most important reason for the rise of the Enterprise Application Software industry was economy of scale. Only 30 years ago all business applications were internally developed by a company’s IT organizations or contractors, with one exception of a General Ledger application available from McCormick & Dodge. The supply of qualified professionals was outstripped by the demand for software by a very wide margin.

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I was writing before here and here about the Contact Management challenges to overall SFA user adoption. There are some exciting news which could help to deal with this challenge.

Jigsaw, a business information provider that relies on a user-generated content model to keep its database of corporate and individual contact information up to date, today announced plans to offer its corporate data free of charge.

“In essence, we’re open sourcing our corporate data,” said CEO Jim Fowler. “Corporate data is close to becoming a commodity. We’re going to make it a complete commodity.”

Designed as an alternative to companies like Hoovers, Jigsaw offers both corporate data, like headquarters, industry and contact information, and contact data, such as direct phone numbers, email and titles for individuals.

Jigsaw users can pay for the contact information via a subscription service and earn additional points for updating records with up-to-date information.

Dubbed the “Open Data Initiative,” Jigsaw is partnering with leading on-demand CRM vendors to bring its corporate data to their CRM systems. Entellium, Landslide, Maximizer, NetSuite, Oracle, Sage and SugarCRM are all making it possible for customers to download Jigsaw’s data via CSV files into their on-demand applications. Microsoft’s CRM online is not part of the program.

Unfortunately it still seem to require some IT tinkering to facilitate proper import of data and subsequent scheduled update in a context of internal Account Management, but it surely is a big step in a right direction.

… very good adoption experience when it was possible to add (mash) external information about Customers and Contacts automatically fed from on-line subscription services. That could be huge value added for salespeople, who otherwise would need to spend hours researching or fly blind without CRM system.

The “mashing” approach implemented in InsideView, I have written about here, is even more attractive and very well worth considering as an important part of CRM implementation strategy. 

Eric Savitz in his Seeking Alpha blog post sites the following:

Piper Jaffray’s Mark Murphy today launched coverage of NetSuite (N) with a Sell rating and a $14 price target, well below the current level.

Murphy’s thesis is that customers are not that happy with the on-demand business software provider’s offerings. “We believe the market has yet to include the potential financial consequences of what we believe to be lower customer satisfaction levels than the broader On Demand industry,” he writes. “While we think our estimates are achievable, there is potential downside risk to our long-term cash flow forecasts if customer concerns are not addressed.”

Murphy says his due diligence with customers uncovered a “higher-than-average mix of unsatisfied customers.” He says that the product gets strong technical reviews once it is operational, but that “deployment frustrates many customers due to the over-arching nature of the project.” He also says that checks with the Better Business Bureau find a 13x higher complaint rate for NetSuite than for Salesforce.com (CRM).

Last weekend the company agreed to acquire its competitor, OpenAir, which is specializing in Professional Services Automation (PSA). The OpenAir has over 300 well satisfied subscribers, but they have to integrate their business flows with other applications, such as Financials, etc. on their own. The Netsuite, by contrast, offers fully integrated approach and sees this acquisition as an upsell opportunity to OpenAir customers. I wonder how these customers will react to the NetSuite overtures considering level of their customers satisfaction.